ABSTRACT
The carefully manicured lawns of Los Angeles’s Westside sprout forests of ominous little signs warning: ‘Armed Response!’ Even richer neighborhoods in the canyons and hillsides isolate themselves behind walls guarded by gun-toting private police and state-of-the-art electronic surveillance. Downtown, a publicly subsidized ‘urban renaissance’ has raised the nation’s largest corporate citadel, segregated from the poor neighborhoods around it by a monumental architectural glacis. In Hollywood, celebrity architect Frank Gehry, renowned for his ‘humanism’, apotheosizes the siege look in a library designed to resemble a foreign-legion fort. In the Westlake district and the San Fernando Valley the Los Angeles Police barricade streets and seal off poor neighborhoods as part of their ‘war on drugs’. In Watts, developer Alexander Haagen demonstrates his strategy for recolonizing innercity retail markets: a panoptican shopping mall surrounded by staked metal fences and a substation of the LAPD in a central surveillance tower. Finally on the horizon of the next millennium, an ex-chief of police crusades for an anti-crime ‘giant eye’—a geosynchronous law enforcement satellitewhile other cops discreetly tend versions of ‘Garden Plot’, a hoary but still viable 1960s plan for a law-and-order armageddon.
